The actual Game Night invitation I sent out to friends. Effort is key.
Sunday night marked the first online game night that I’ve hosted with friends from all avenues of my online life. The events that follow have renewed my desire to maintain my friendships with these online pals and continue to host events that hopefully we will always remember!
This weekend after a couple of weeks of planning I was finally able to execute hosting my first ever online community game night. It. Was. Awesome! The turnout was great, the group was awesome, the games we fun, the feedback was amazing. Initially I had hopped to get about 4 or 5 people to actually show up and play some games. I chose a time that I felt would benefit most people out of my group. We have a pretty wide swing in availability, with some having the whole day off, others working evenings, and yet a few even work early mornings (ewww!) So I picked 3:00pm on a Sunday afternoon. I created a discord event, and personally DM’d several people that I thought might not see it, or might help me spread the word. I told everyone that it was a very casual event, they could come and go as they pleased, and we would scale the games to meet the group size. A challenge in of itself. So I picked a couple games that I thought might be able to accommodate this. When the start time rolled around, I popped on discord, and initiated the event. I decided I would show up a few minutes early just in case. Well I was solo for probably 20 to 30 minutes, and kind of started to think that this might not be the turnout of the century. I jumped in to an APEX Legends game. After being incredibly humbled in 5 or 6 games in a row I received the first Discord DM. “I’ll be on in 10!”
So ten minutes later one of my buddies loads up APEX, hops in to the voice chat and off we go. Now I am still getting absolutely destroyed, but this time, with a friend. Much better. A few minutes later we have another friend pop in to discord and the night really kicks off. We play a couple more rounds of APEX as there are only three of us at this point, but shortly after we have a few more people pop in. This time we decided to head off to the wonderful world of Team Fortress 2.
Team Fortress 2 is a game that is silly enough to be fun, but still a bit competitive, and has the flexibility to add people as they come. So we started in a public server and were immediately met with multiple cheaters. So we decided to find some community servers with a bit of oversight and live admins. We jumped in to a KOTH (King of the Hill for those unacquainted) and we had a blast trying to kill each other. I think some lessons were learned during this initial event. While it was definitely fun playing with everyone, I think if we had removed the random element of players who make TF2 their life’s goal, we probably would have had even more fun. By the time we ended TF2 we had 8 people playing. Competitive TF2 is 6v6, so just a few more people and we could have hosted our own server and had a blast. As I own a machine that has been repurposed as a server, this might be something we try in the not so distant future.
Anyhoo, after about an hour or so of TF2, we decided to try Crab Game. We had a couple more people join us, bringing our total for the night to ten. This way outpaced my expectations and I was so happy to be able to play with all my friends. Most of the people in the group had never heard of, much less played Crab Game. I decided to host and got everyone invited in to the server and we did a couple rounds before a random crash. After that another one of our group gave hosting a shot, but accidently left the lobby open to the public. We were able to get our group of 10 in the game without issue, and then were immediately filled with another 10 random players. This honestly became the highlight of the night for the most part. After banning a few people who decided to cheat (in Crab Game… why?) As well as banning a few who couldn’t figure out how to behave in public (shame on their parents,) we really had a great time with the various games. Many of us began having personal vendetta’s and scores to settle with each other that carried over from one game to the next. “Truce! Truce!” Was desperately yelled out more than once, only to be greeted with “Just kidding,” as friend betrayed friend. Honestly it was kind of a wonder that everyone stayed friends post game.
We wrapped up the night with one final round of Crab Game before saying good night to all and promising to do it again. It really seemed like everyone had a great time. I have had many people reach out with suggestions on various games that would be fun and easily accessible. I brought up that Fall Guys will be going to the Epic Game Store on June 21st and will be moving to Free to Play! So we definitely will have to try that. Some other games have been suggested. Among Us, Halo, Golf With Friends, Mount Your Friends, Pummel Party, etc. As I said, I was so happy to be able to play games with everyone who was able to make it, and I received word from nearly everyone else I invited that couldn’t make it, that they wanted to be included in the next one. Let me know what games you’ve played or would like to play with a group of friends for game night in the comments down below!
Thank you for reading, and as always, happy gaming!
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